| Workstreams | Corporate and Transactional Services |
| PID Reference | SWCoE 0042, 0043 |
| Funding Detail | £250k, £20k |
| Chief Executive Champion | n/a |
| Programme Leader | Gail Newton, Carrick District Council |
| Project Manager | Peter Shields (IDeA), assisted by Dermot Lacey (IDeA) |
Project Objectives and Scope
The objective of the programme is to develop and pilot a “one stop shop” support programme to help LAs deliver benefits in Corporate and Transactional Services (C&TS) and productive time through:
- Business process improvement and standardisation, and
- Taking a ‘shared services’ approach to the delivery of C&TS
The programme would also promote a standardised approach to help reduce barriers to collaborating and then sharing services between LAs.
The programme will be developed and piloted on a cluster of LAs and will be completed by the end of February 2007. IDeA will provide the capacity (at cost) to develop the programme: the “IDeA” branding will add gravitas to the programme. If the pilot is proven successful, then the SWCoE would propose to subsidise the delivery of the approach across up to ten other LA clusters across the SW, up to an additional cost of £500k (including an overall programme manager).
The SWCoE will work closely with the West Midlands (WMids) RCE to share the development of the work. Both the WMids and SW RCEs are also working with the National RCE C&TS workstrand and DCLG to reduce duplication and unnecessary development.
Anticipated gains from the project
Financial benefits
Benefits from the eventual roll-out of this programme across ten clusters of authorities are in the order of £360,000 cashable (reduced consultancy procurement costs) and £225,000 non-cashable (reduced in-house development effort by councils). Further benefits should accrue through promoting efficiency gains from C&TS and productive time, but these are significantly more difficult to quantify at this stage.
See document “0042 PID v0.3 RSe template.xls” for further details about costs and benefits, including assumptions and calculations (available from SWCoE).
Soft benefits
The key benefits of the support programme approach to local authorities revolve around adopting a standardised approach and providing hands-on dissemination of good practice, including:
Benefits to the sector:
- A more expedient route to shared services through early use of business process optimisation to deliver quicker wins within a context of eventual shared services.
- Consistent and standardised approach to business process architecture
- Standardised terms and terminology
- Single approach to process mapping
- Simple access to latest material and good approaches (rather than repeatedly paying consultancies for this)
- Standardised approach to BPR governance and programme management (eg Sprint)
- Rapid process improvement
- Improved quality of engagement and better value for councils when using external consultancy support
Benefits to the RCE
- RCEs are positioned centrally in the Business Transformation arena
Benefits to Providers
- Local authorities become more receptive to need for good preparation work
Wider implications and anticipated gains if it were successfully rolled out
The whole rationale of the project is to develop a method and materials that will be reusable throughout the region and maybe nationally
